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Stack snippets are available on this meta.stackexchange.com site, but as mentioned in the initial meta post about them there was no discussion as to whether they should be here or not.

I would suggest they be disabled / removed from this site.

We get many off-topic programming / code questions here, and the fact that the snippets buttons render within the questions gives those questions a sense of legitimacy, potentially indicating to the poster that their question is actually valid here, when that is likely not the case.

I'm sure there are some valid use-cases for having them around - sandbox testing for instance - but that could be mitigated by referring people to the a sandbox post on MSO instead.

Do we need stack snippets on a site dedicated to questions about Stack Exchange? We would still be able to discuss them, but I don't think there's a need to actually implement them here.

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    It would impact 26 answers outside the Testing questions
    – rene Mod
    Commented Apr 21, 2016 at 15:21

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I believe the reason is that the team plan to enable the Snippets on other sites, at some point, so the proper meta for bugs related to the Stack Snippets is/will be MSE.

This is why it is enabled here, in my opinion, and I really don't think that someone who failed to notice it's the wrong place to begin with will notice this missing icon and suddenly realize "Hey, it's not Stack Overflow!".

So I don't think we should remove this from MSE. Let it live, and as usual deal with the off topic questions as they arrive.

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  • Does this Meta site allow all the various site features? I think it supports LaTeX, presumably for this reason, but is that the same for all additional features? For instance, the Balsamiq editor found in UX.StackExchange isn't available here (although I suppose that's only a one-site feature, so would be handled by the ux.meta site).
    – JonW
    Commented Apr 21, 2016 at 13:20
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    @JonW valid point, the answer is no, but the reason is performance. Those libraries are huge, so having them load with every page means noticeable drop in performance (e.g. 0.2 second) and it's not worth it in this case. The Snippets on the other hand, don't require any huge JS library, as far as I know.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Apr 21, 2016 at 13:23

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